The episode opens not with a joke, but with trauma. The Cooper family, still reeling from the tornado that destroyed part of their home and nearly killed Missy, is no longer a sitcom family. They are a compression algorithm trying to reconcile a before and after. The h265 codec works by analyzing blocks of motion—where things change and where they stay the same. In this episode, the “unchanging blocks” are Sheldon’s self-absorption and Mary’s religious rigidity. The “motion blocks” are George and Missy.
